Reactions to Jacob Turner’s Designation

Turner showed plenty of flashes, but struggled to string together a run of competitive starts. His biggest issue this season was closing out hitters and innings. Opponents slashed .384/.405/.571 with two outs against him.

Including Sunday’s loss to the Reds, who tagged him for five runs on nine hits over four innings, Turner in 12 starts was 4-5 with a 6.03 ERA. He didn’t do much better out of the bullpen.

In other words, it was his inconsistency, and lack of roster flexibility, that ultimately forced the Marlins to designate Turner for assignment and expose him to the rest of the league.

Perhaps the main reason behind his continued decline can be pointed to two separate reasons: Lack of consistency and inability to keep the ball in the strike zone. Even though that second issue seemed to be solved during the current season (2.64 BB/9 in 2014 compared to 4.12 in 2013), Turner has failed to eclipse that barrier of being a mediocre to below-average piece on an otherwise solid rotation.

While the diminishing of his walk rate would seem to be looked at as a potential positive for Turner, a handful of other factors would probably point you into a completely different direction. A prime example of that would be how opposing batters continue to tee off on him on a consistent basis. During the 2014 season, Turner allowed the opposing batters to have an awful .323/.376/.488 split line, which showcases the consistency that they had against the right-handed starter.

Mike Redmond addressed Turner’s release. “It just came to a point where he wasn’t getting any better, wasn’t showing any improvement and we felt we couldn’t do anything more to help him. Things like this are always tough, but that’s part of the business.”

When you look at the overall picture, you see that Turner just was getting rocked too consistently, and there wasn’t any one thing that the Marlins could point to for him to work on. As we noted in another article, the Marlins are no longer in the business of developing talent at the big league level – they want to win. Some may say they have no business making such demands, but the fact is they are well-positioned within their division to make a run if things begin firing on all cylinders. Turner is not a player who resembles that at this point.

That said, Mike Hill is hopeful they can retain Turner and give him further development, something the Fish most likely would have done more of if Turner didn’t arrive to the Marlins with very little roster flexibility left due to the Tigers’ mismanagement of his options and rushing him to the big leagues.

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About jonnylons

"Jonnylons" has been a life-long Marlins fan - which isn't hard since they've only been around in since '93 and he's been around a bit longer. He founded MarlinsNation.com in order to provide a voice to Marlins fans on the internet which he started when he was up in Tallahassee at Florida State and was stranded with no Marlins games on TV up in that market.